Friday, 18 October 2013

Back to work :3

So, I've been back at University for a few weeks now
Apologies for the lack of updates since coming back, there's been a lot going on lately, but hopefully I'll be back to blogging regularly now :3

I guess I'll begin by talking about the holidays as I kept myself quite busy during that.

I spent some time practicing 3D techniques, as mentioned in my previous blog post, but unfortunately didn't get quite as far with that as I wanted to. I didn't really feel very accomplished whilst at home in the holidays and without any feedback (I couldn't upload things, so couldn't ask for advice from friends or from lecturers) so it mostly consisted of me playing around with the software for a few hours a day, learning different rigs, but not really having amazing work to show for it.
I do feel it helped a lot, but I went in wanting to improve my showreel tons and I don't feel like that has happened (I only ended up being truly happy with a couple of things I animated)

I finished about half of the things on my list and then chose to do something I felt was more productive from a CV perspective and enrolled on a EU recognized adult learning course named ECDL, which I completed in a couple of months and received a qualification for :D So not a completely wasted summer, luckily ^_^

Here's one of the animation tests I did during the summer, that I was most happy with
I spent quite a lot of time focusing on the characters facial expression and subtle eye movements and I think it's probably the best animation I've done in CG to date, so I'll definitely be including it in my next show reel once it's all fleshed out :3

Other than that, my holiday consisted of doing art commissions (my style has changed a lot o-o) Editing game footage to music, to work on timing and spending time with my family/relaxing :)

Here's a few other things I worked on during the holidays
Art -

The above work is mostly commissioned pieces I worked on during the summer, along with a comic I made. My 6 year old bamboo tablet ended up on it's last legs, so I decided to buy the Cintiq 13HD I'd been saving up for last holiday (but didn't save up enough to get, before I came to uni) and bought it just before term started :3

It's an amazing little thing and I think it's making me pay a lot more attention to little details in my work as well as work faster and more efficiently, which can only be a good thing :D All I can say, is 3 months packing biscuits 9 hours a day, last holiday was totally worth it, even if it was hell at the time ;u; Hopefully it'll last me as long, if not much longer than my Bamboo did c: Little thing is still fighting onwards, even with the odd connection issue from time to time :'3

The three orange Charr drawings are post new tablet and as you can see, my work has become much more loose since getting it :3

Editing -

I really wanted to practice my editing more, I find it really relaxing to just sit down and edit footage to music, so I edited a couple of GW2 video's, most that I recorded myself and one that I used the watercolour style cutscenes of Guild Wars 2 for. The cutscenes in this game are beautifully done and so was the ending theme of Guild Wars 2 'Fear not this night'. So I chose to combine the two, editing a lot of the cutscenes to the music, which I found lots of fun :3

Below are a few of these videos

I have a couple of animatics to post up and a few life drawings, so you'll be seeing more from me soon c: but for now, that's all from me :D